Pike Place Market and Downtown Seattle

We took the Monorail downtown. It was such a fast-moving train, up in the sky, and the distance was so short, that we arrived in about a minute at the mall where the train stops downtown. We got out and walked around, seeing beautiful architecture; a lot of the downtown buildings are about a hundred years old.

Our wandering at that stage was in the general direction of Pike Place Market. We started to wander around the market, in the drizzle, and we discovered that not much was open. It’s funny, since my travel book recommends showing up early in the morning to avoid the crowds; the author must have been assuming you were there during the tourist season. My dad rubbed it in, that the travel book wasn’t accurate in this respect, and he mentioned this to many of the people he talked to (and of course, he talked to a lot of people). So we walked back up to I think it was First Ave, very close to the market, and we had breakfast at  a bagel place; my bagel sandwich was a veggie dried tomato bagel, and I drank a cup of chai.

After breakfast we resumed wandering around Pike Place, though some booths and shops were not yet open. However, more had opened during our meal. One of the indoor shops was a used bookstore, but it was closed; I peered through the window and saw enticing antique books. After wandering around one section of Pike Place, we crossed the street and came to a structure that looks original (this is a market that’s been around, in the same location, since 1907), with white-painted columns along what looks like very long hallways flanked by booths, mostly arts and crafts booths. We saw lots and lots of beautiful flowers. I picked out a Chinese brush painting of a cat, and the artist painted my name in Chinese at the right side of the painting.

We wandered into a radical collective bookstore called Left Bank Books—it’s more like the anarchist book collective in San Francisco than like the Left Bank Books in St. Louis, although that’s a cool shop too. I purchased three books, Cracking India by Bapsi Sidhwa (I started reading it after we got back to the hotel, and within the first paragraph I figured out this is the novel that Deepa Mehta’s film Earth is based on), an academic nonfiction book called The Femicide Machine, by Sergio Gonzalez Rodriguez, about the great number of women killed and forgotten in Mexico, and one other academic book published by the same university press (at least, I think that was the other book—I definitely got three).

We started to explore downtown for real this time and wandered into a Nepalese restaurant, Kastoori Grill, where we had a great buffet lunch. The food was Indian, Nepalese, and Tibetan (including a Tibetan soup that I actually liked even though generally I’m unimpressed with Tibetan food). I call it a Nepalese restaurant because all the staff I saw looked Nepalese, and the décor included Nepalese things such as a beautifully beaded and sequined bridal shawl and Nepalese Buddhist images.

As we resumed walking around downtown and admiring the architecture, we came to the Fifth Avenue Theater; the façade at least had traditional Chinese style, and the theater clearly dates to the vaudeville/movie palace days. The current play was Damn Yankees, and I was really tempted to ask my dad if he was interested in seeing the play tonight, even though I knew he’d want to go to bed early in order to leave early in the morning; not to mention, it was still the afternoon and we’d have to either hang out downtown an awfully long time or leave and come back in order to see the play. So I didn’t ask. Or at least, I don’t think I did.

We descended a staircase underneath the theater and strangely ended up inside a Hilton Hotel. My dad needed to use the restroom, and we found restrooms that required a numbered code; that is, there were a bunch of buttons for typing in a combination. An employee saw us and told us the code (1947), probably under the impression that we were guests at the fancy Hilton Hotel. We did some more wandering before getting back on the monorail and heading back to our neighborhood.

We visited one more bookstore: the little independent used bookstore around the corner from the hotel. I’ve been to three bookstores in Seattle (not counting the Pike Place one that was closed at 9 am). Books, glorious books! I’d better not buy any more books for a long time. Sure.